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From: hestenes@sdcsla.UUCP (Eric Hestenes)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Music Works' Volume Control...
Message-ID: <864@sdcsla.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-May-85 07:18:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcsla.864
Posted: Thu May 23 07:18:31 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 27-May-85 06:39:08 EDT
References: <2143@decwrl.UUCP> <5365@Shasta.ARPA>
Organization: U.C. San Diego, Cognitive Science Lab
Lines: 40

> > Someone responded to my original appreciation of Music Work's 
...
> > But, the entire point of my comment was lost:  Regardless of the "right 
> > or wrongness" of using your OWN volume control (not to be determined 
> > here), once that decision was made, their treatment of the "removal" 
> > from the Control Panel was WELL DONE!!!! and shows some of the 
> > inventivness and personal expression available on the Mac!
> 
> Unfortunately, this sort of hack can never be "well done" no matter how

You missed the original author's point entirely. Regardless of whether
the fix was good or bad in terms of software engineering, the patch was 
most certainly good in terms of the user interface, because the authors
went way out of their way to make sure that the change was visible to you.
Because the change was so overtly visible to you, you might infer that
the software was changed. Without important contextual clues like this
one might never know that a patch/kludge had been made.  Importantly, though
the authors made a software design choice to create a separate tool, they
provided a clue to this choice. You may question the design choice in terms
of software engineering, but the the act of leaving a clue is unquestionably
sound, and constitutes a form of documentation. If only all hacks had similar
contextual support.

Why do we so often overlook the human machine interface?

Eric Hestenes
Institute for Cognitive Science, C-015
UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA. 92093
(619)452-6220

Please copy replies to:

ARPA: sdcsla!hestenes@nprdc 
other: ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcsla!hestenes
-- 
Eric Hestenes
Institute for Cognitive Science, C-015
UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA. 92093
(619)452-6220
ARPA: sdcsla!hestenes@nprdc or hestenes@nprdc